What's the role of the data scientist in 15 years?

(upbeat instrumental music) - [Interviewer] Let's take a look in the future here, the role of the data scientist as it evolves 10, 15 years from now. Take me there, what does that look like? - (laughs) If you asked me that 10, 15 years ago, when I was still just trying to get a job in Silicon Valley, that there would be a United States Chief Data Scientist and I'd be the one stepping into that role, I couldn't even predict that. So when I think about 10, 15 years out, I find that there's two sides of this. One is, I see a world where people are thinking about data and they have toolkits and they have accessibility and they have visibility in the systems, where they're able to take data and bring it together in this unbelievable way to create change, to push for a better world. There's the other side, which is, in the classic ying and yang of this, is that there's people who are doing incredibly more damaging things with technology and data. And so, we have to balance both of those pieces. Why do I still remain an optimist versus a pessimist, given that, is I look at all what the new generation of each year of data scientists and technologists and what they're trying to do with data, and I am so blown away. You know, we used to have these White House science fairs, where you'd bring kids from all around the country together to show what they're doing and what they're doing with data, and I just was so blown away, time and time again, where there's this kid who's literally built, you know, this machine learning AI prediction engine to try to identify your DNA where cancer sites are. And he's just, just like I found when was using a data set on weather forecasting when I was working in grad school, in this case he's 17 and he's figured out, like, how to find a DNA database to find cancer and his algorithms are unbelievable, that's amazing. There's a fellow, and after the hurricanes in Texas, was like, well, why can't I just use machine learning to figure out where all the bridges are washed out and text out to the population, or tell first responders? 'Cause I have the video imagery and I can just say, that's not a bridge anymore, that's got debris. It's just like, that's incredibly clever. I wouldn't have thought of that. And so, I think we're still at this very beginning of scratching the surface of how data's gonna be used. When Vice President Biden had brought all these people together to ask, how could we really create a moonshot on cancer, one of the biggest things that we realized was, if we slam all these databases together of your health records in a secure, safe way, we might actually already have solutions for some kind of cancers, but you can't see them because they're broken out there. President Obama called for something called precision medicine, and this is a program that is now off and running of how do we create tailored medical treatments, at the genetic level or other ways, to understand population health? And what would it look like if we were able to look across the entire set of data across a nation, from people who volunteered their data, to find the root causes of disease in a way that we haven't thought through? Those ideas will start to manifest, just as it took us 10 years to take advantage of how long, what it takes to sequence a DNA, we're now seeing, what is it 10 years from now we'll see? What does it take to combine all those different data sets around DNA and there are sensors everywhere, to ask what else could be done? We'll see new environmental controls of people being able to do better electricity management. How do you do better supply chain? How do we make sure that we're able to do customized education, tailor treatments? We can tailor ads, we certainly can figure out how to tailor better content from an educational perspective. You know, that's the world that I believe that is coming ahead of us. (upbeat instrumental music)